Summary: Have you seen those barcode-looking things recently but haven’t got the slightest what they’re for? After this post, you’ll see how they might just end up making your life a little bit easier one day!

Scan me!

Many of you reading this have undoubtedly seen a QR (Quick Response) code by now (the thing pictured to the right), but there’s just as much — if not more — confusion surrounding them today as there was a number of years ago. Well, prepare to no longer be confused by these highly-useful things that are seemingly popping up everywhere these days (and for good reason, too)!

Put simply, QR codes serve as an ultra-fast reference for something that someone can look up immediately on the spot, or at a later time. By using your cell phone and a QR code reader app, scanning a QR code might yield a Web address, name and address, phone number, email address, pre-filled text message, or some other similar data type. To give you a better visualization of how it works, consider the following 3 short scenarios:

Scenario 1: You’re walking around in a town you’ve never been to before, collecting menus from restaurants that you’re hoping to find some decent local food from. But instead of simply handing out takeaway menus, you notice many of the restaurants are providing an eco-friendly QR code for you to scan to see their menu and effectively have it with you at all times on your phone.

Scenario 2: You’re out at a concert, listening to one of your favorite bands, when all of a sudden, you notice the guitarist is wearing a shirt with a giant QR code on the back of it. Being in the 7th row and knowing what a QR code is, you take out your phone so you can get a picture of it to see what he wants you to see. Lo and behold, you’ve just earned a secret backstage pass right there on the spot that no one else can win now because you were the first to access it!

Scenario 3: You’re flying over a city about 15 minutes out from landing at your destination, when all of a sudden, you notice an incredibly massive QR code that has been painted on the top of an entire building. Once again, you take out your phone and quickly take a picture so you can see what it’s all about (be it a URL, phone number, text message, or otherwise) once you’ve got cell service again.

Those are just a few scenarios, but there are TONS of scenarios that companies and individuals are currently utilizing QR codes for. Just the other night, I was practically inundated by QR codes while out eating dinner at a restaurant: their menu had a QR code on it so you could have a copy to go right there on the spot, the ketchup bottle on the table had a QR code on it so you could visit the manufacturer’s Web site, and someone had printed out a QR code on a sheet of paper and stuck it on the mirror in the men’s restroom.

Now, what do you do when you see a QR code? Well, you either need a camera or a phone with an in-built camera. If you have a phone with an in-built camera, there are plenty of QR code apps you can download from your respective app store/market that will allow you to scan a QR code and it’ll show you the information contained within it. If you only have a camera, then you can simply take a picture of a QR code with which to upload later to a site like ZXing Decoder Online. Lastly, if you’re interested in creating your own QR code, well, that’s just about as easy as decoding one, what with online QR code generators like this one.

For as quick and convenient as QR codes are, they aren’t 100% risk-free, since all kinds of data can be contained within them. Wikipedia spells it out best in their QR code risks section:

Malicious QR codes combined with a permissive reader can put a computer’s contents and user’s privacy at risk. They are easily created and may be affixed over legitimate QR codes. On a smartphone, the reader’s many permissions may allow use of the camera, full internet access, read/write contact data, GPS, read browser history, read/write local storage, and global system changes.

Risks include linking to dangerous websites with browser exploits, enabling the microphone/camera/GPS and then streaming those feeds to a remote server, analysis of sensitive data (passwords, files, contacts, transactions), and sending email/SMS/IM messages or DDOS packets as part of a botnet, corrupting privacy settings, stealing identity, and even containing malicious logic themselves such as JavaScript or a virus. These actions may occur in the background while the user only sees the reader opening a seemingly harmless webpage.

In other words, the information waiting on the other side of a QR code might not be all roses and sunshine — even if it’s something as simple as a derogatory plain text message.

So, with all that said and now that you know everything you need to know to make use of QR codes, what are you waiting for? Start by scanning the QR code you see in the upper right-hand corner of my post (I promise it’s not malicious) and see where it leads to. From there, be on the lookout for QR codes all around you as you’re shopping, eating, vacationing, working, browsing, etc. Before long, they may just start making life a little more convenient for you!

A service that allows drivers to pay for parking from their smartphones hopes to expand the service to private garages, city streets and even valet services.

San Francisco-based QuickPay partners with parking providers to allow mobile payment and access to private garages and public, metered spaces. In many cases, garage and lot owners and municipalities must only put up QR codes to start receiving payments from people with the QP QuickPay app on their iPhone or Android device.

Users must download the app and enter payment and vehicle information, then scan QR codes to pay for parking or gain access to private lots without parking attendants. For each transaction QuickPay takes a percentage from the user and the facility. The setup is active mostly in California but expanding across the country. The first East Coast location is Boston’s Pi Alley garage, shown above.

“They can pay with credit cards at facilities that normally take only cash, bypass the cashiers, skip taking tickets or worrying about lost tickets, and get e-mail receipts,” said QuickPay chief executive Barney Pell. “For some facilities, they can enter by special lanes, or even get access to locations that are normally available only to monthly parkers.”

Pell said the system will open up access those small, unattended lots and garages that usually cater to monthly parkers. First, the facilities must let QuickPay know rates and what hours they’re open and set up payment information.

“Then to work with their existing systems, we have a proprietary and inexpensive gate-arm kit that we install at each parking entrance and exit gate, which lets our cloud-based system raise the gate whenever a user scans the gate’s QR code with their mobile device,” Pell said.

On public roads, cities and towns can simply post a QR code on a parking meter. Once the user scans the code with a smartphone, his or her license plate info is sent to enforcement so no tickets are issued. While that may require some minor technology upgrades at a systemwide level, it doesn’t require any improvement to meters. Valet parking attendants can use QuickPay-generated confirmation codes to collect payment and keep track of who owns what car.

From the user standpoint, parkers can also use the QP QuickPay app to find open parking spots, look up rates and get directions to garages. Eventually, Pell envisions the app supporting dynamic pricing, where parking rates change depending on demand. Additionally, QuickPay will let parking facilities hold spaces and offer discounts. “Over time, [QuickPay] will support loyalty programs, coupons, advance reservations and much more.”

This morning, QuickPay executives announced that they had received an unspecified amount of funding from Fontinalis Partners, a Michigan investment firm whose founding partners include Ford executive chairman William Clay Ford Jr. QuickPay boss Pell is himself a well-known name in the tech community, having founded numerous companies including Powerset, a search technology company acquired by Microsoft, and Moon Express, a lunar exploration and mining company.

As we heard last week, Isis, the carrier-led joint venture between AT&T, T-Mobile and Verizon, is picking up steam in the NFC world to make these payments a reality. And we know Google has made a big bet on NFC as a payments technology. But it’s still unclear whether NFC (near field communication), which allows devices to exchange data over short distances with a wave or a tap, will become a major force. But Juniper seems optimistic that NFC payments will become a huge market in the payments world forecasting that global NFC mobile contactless payment transactions will reach nearly $74 billion worldwide by 2015.

Juniper contends that NFC is increasingly being used for the payment of goods in-store and as transport tickets; and is already over triple the expectation for 2011. Additionally, the firm says that the use of mobile devices as an alternative to credit cards and paper tickets is one of the fastest growing segments of the mobile commerce market.

Juniper’s David Snow explained in the report “Our report demonstrates the spectacular growth we see across all segments of the mobile commerce market. Four of these segments (money transfer, physical goods, NFC and coupons) will more than triple in transaction value over the next three years, whilst digital goods, banking and tickets will still on average, double over the same period.”

The barrier to mobile payments and NFC, says Juniper, are both real and perceived security risks. Even if one application is found to be unsecure, this could throw off the whole market.

Other findings include that SMS is the key to widespread mobile banking service adoption and without interoperability mobile money transfer services will have difficulty gaining a critical mass of users. And while mobile coupons still represent the smallest mobile commerce segment, it is demonstrating the highest growth rate.

Last year, Juniper forecasted that North America and Western Europe together will exceed the Far East region in under three years based on transaction value. And North America and Western Europe will account for 50% of NFC payments market by value in 2014.

Slowly but surely, more companies are incorporating NFC into payments solutions, but there are still questions as to whether NFC will become a dominant technology in the mobile payments landscape of the future, especially when other companies including PayPal, Square and others seem to be shying away from making a big bet on the technology. The other missing component is Apple’s participation in the space, and it’s still unclear if the iPhone maker will be adopting the technology.

The idea of using a smartphone as a wallet has been slow to catch on in the United States. A big part of the problem has been that most stores do not have the proper physical equipment to allow customers to pay by tapping their phone.

These stores also do not have the right equipment to allow the use of smart cards, credit cards embedded with computer chips that are much less susceptible to fraud.

But a change is coming that will push both innovations at the same time.

Merchants are facing heavy pressure to upgrade their payment terminals to accept smart cards. Over the last several months, Visa, Discover and MasterCard have said that merchants that cannot accept these cards will be liable for any losses owing to fraud.

“Everybody is going to be upgrading,” said Jennifer Miles, an executive vice president at VeriFone, which provides payment terminals to most merchants in the United States.

While updating the terminals for smart cards, VeriFone also plans to upgrade for smartphone wallets, providing the capability for near-field communication, the technology used by the Google and Isis wallets, the two biggest smartphone wallet projects.

Before the credit card companies made their announcements, almost no merchants were buying terminals with smart card and N.F.C. capabilities, Ms. Miles said. As of January, though, VeriFone stopped installing terminals that did not have N.F.C. readers. Moving to N.F.C. is a windfall for VeriFone, considering that the new systems cost 10 to 30 percent more than standard ones.

It is also a boon for Google and Isis, a cooperative venture of AT&T, Verizon and T-Mobile. Google Wallet has been severely limited by a lack of N.F.C.-enabled merchants and phones. Isis, meanwhile is planning to start service later this year in only two cities, Austin, Tex., and Salt Lake City.

It picked Salt Lake City largely because its public transportation system had already installed N.F.C. readers, said Ryan Hughes, the chief marketing officer at Isis.

“This was a gift, to be honest, that was sitting under our Christmas tree that we didn’t anticipate,” he said, of the recent moves by the credit card companies and VeriFone.

Ms. Miles of VeriFone now believes that N.F.C. could be completely mainstream within five years. While that sounds speedy by some standards — she notes that debit cards took about four times that long to take hold — other companies pursuing mobile wallets are not willing to wait.

Square, a start-up founded by Jack Dorsey of Twitter, has gained a foothold among small merchants by distributing a free credit card swiper that attaches to a smartphone or tablet, allowing these swipers to serve as their own payment terminals. The company now sees its relationships with merchants as a way to promote its own mobile wallet application, which it revamped in March.

Called Pay With Square, the app tells users which merchants nearby accept Square. When a customer enters those stores, the application alerts the merchant, who can then accept a payment by confirming the person’s identity through the photograph associated with the account.

PayPal meanwhile, is trying to move its popular online commerce accounts into the physical world. It recently began passing out Square-like devices, although its version is triangular. In addition to credit cards and checks, PayPal’s system also allows merchants to accept payment via PayPal accounts by typing in their personal identification number.

Both PayPal and Square say that asking customers to buy N.F.C.-enabled phones and wait for merchants to install new hardware is folly. Neither company says it has plans to incorporate N.F.C. into its wallet.

“If I were a device manufacturer, or a device operator, and that was the tool that I had at my disposal to enter the payments market, that might be the thing I pushed,” Sam Schrauger, PayPal’s former vice president for global products and experience, said in an interview shortly before he left the company in April.

But the other systems have inherent weaknesses as well. Because they rely on a wireless data connection, they are vulnerable to service interruptions. Also, some analysts question whether passing out free hardware will be tenable once merchants have to accept smart cards, because these readers are expected to be significantly more expensive to manufacture.

Northside Independent School District plans to track students next year on two of its campuses using technology implanted in their student identification cards in a trial that could eventually include all 112 of its schools and all of its nearly 100,000 students.

District officials said the Radio Frequency Identification System (RFID) tags would improve safety by allowing them to locate students — and count them more accurately at the beginning of the school day to help offset cuts in state funding, which is partly based on attendance.

Northside, the largest school district in Bexar County, plans to modify the ID cards next year for all students attending John Jay High School, Anson Jones Middle School and all special education students who ride district buses. That will add up to about 6,290 students.

The school board unanimously approved the program late Tuesday but, in a rarity for Northside trustees, they hotly debated it first, with some questioning it on privacy grounds.

State officials and national school safety experts said the technology was introduced in the past decade but has not been widely adopted. Northside's deputy superintendent of administration, Brian Woods, who will take over as superintendent in July, defended the use of RFID chips at Tuesday's meeting, comparing it to security cameras. He stressed that the program is only a pilot and not permanent.

“We want to harness the power of (the) technology to make schools safer, know where our students are all the time in a school, and increase revenues,” district spokesman Pascual Gonzalez said. “Parents expect that we always know where their children are, and this technology will help us do that.”

Chip readers on campuses and on school buses can detect a student's location but can't track them once they leave school property. Only authorized administrative officials will have access to the information, Gonzalez said.

“This way we can see if a student is at the nurse's office or elsewhere on campus, when they normally are counted for attendance in first period,” he said.

Gonzalez said the district plans to send letters to parents whose students are getting the the RFID-tagged ID cards. He said officials understand that students could leave the card somewhere, throwing off the system. They cost $15 each, and if lost, a student will have to pay for a new one.

Parents interviewed outside Jay and Jones as they picked up their children Thursday were either supportive, skeptical or offended.

Veronica Valdorrinos said she would be OK if the school tracks her daughter, a senior at Jay, as she always fears for her safety. Ricardo and Juanita Roman, who have two daughters there, said they didn't like that Jay was targeted.

Gonzalez said the district picked schools with lower attendance rates and staff willing to pilot the tags.

Some parents said they understood the benefits but had reservations over privacy.

“I would hope teachers can help motivate students to be in their seats instead of the district having to do this,” said Margaret Luna, whose eighth-grade granddaughter at Jones will go to Jay next year. “But I guess this is what happens when you don't have enough money.”

The district plans to spend $525,065 to implement the pilot program and $136,005 per year to run it, but it will more than pay for itself, predicted Steve Bassett, Northside's assistant superintendent for budget and finance. If successful, Northside would get $1.7 million next year from both higher attendance and Medicaid reimbursements for busing special education students, he said.

But the payoff could be a lot bigger if the program goes districtwide, Bassett said.

He said the program was one way the growing district could respond to the Legislature's cuts in state education funding. Northside trimmed its budget last year by $61.4 million.

Two school districts in the Houston area — Spring and Santa Fe ISDs — have used the technology for several years and have reported gains of hundreds of thousands of dollars in revenue for improved attendance. Spring ISD spokeswoman Karen Garrison said the district, one-third the size of Northside, hasn't had any parent backlash.

In Tuesday's board debate, trustee M'Lissa M. Chumbley said she worried that parents might feel the technology violated their children's privacy rights. She didn't want administrators tracking teachers' every move if they end up outfitted with the tags, she added.

The American Civil Liberties Union fought the use of the technology in 2005 at a rural elementary school in California and helped get the program canceled, said Kirsten Bokenkamp, an ACLU spokeswoman in Texas. She said concerns about the tags include privacy and the risks of identity theft or kidnapping if somebody hacks into the system.

CEREAL boxes are, by and large, poor works of literature. Yet many people sit at breakfast reading them over and over again. Last year Kellogg’s realised it could make its packets more entertaining—and guessed that people also had their phones to hand (anything beats talking to the family). The cornflake-maker put 2D codes, better known as QR (for quick response) codes, on its Crunchy Nut boxes in America. When scanned, these took cereal-munchers to a video of dawn in, say, Washington state. The idea was to push cereal as an all-day snack: “It’s morning somewhere.”

QR codes—squares of black-and-white patterns—have much to recommend them. They store far more information than plain, old bar codes. For example, they can fit in web addresses and logos. And they are cheap. They have been popular in Japan for years, but elsewhere have for a while been touted as the next big thing. (In 2009 this newspaper said they were “on the point of breaking out”.)

Over the past year, QR codes have quietly slipped into the marketing mainstream. Three-quarters of American online retailers surveyed by Forrester, a research firm, use them. In April nearly 20% of smartphone users in America scanned one, up from 14% in May last year (see chart 1). According to comScore, another research company, more than two-thirds of Americans and Europeans who scan QR codes do so in order to obtain information about a product. Japanese smartphone-owners, by contrast, are most likely to download a discount coupon or a special offer (see chart 2).

Scanlife, a provider of QR code services, saw the number of unique users scanning codes through its system triple in the year to March. One reason for the rise is the proliferation of smartphones with high-quality cameras and the corresponding decline in data charges. It also took time for people to realise why advertisements contained mutant crosswords. And perhaps most important, marketers have only now worked out how best to use QR codes. Simply sending customers to the company website is not enough, says Melissa Parrish, an analyst at Forrester. In-store promotions are catching on. Coupons are always popular. Real-world treasure hunts have also been successful.

For marketers, QR codes bridge the gap between offline and online worlds. Customers who use them are, in effect, asking to be told more about the company. The success of a campaign is easy to measure by the number of scans. Expect to see a lot more of those funny little black-and-white patches.

When 29-year-old manufacturing worker Michael Hellesen sees a Quick Response code around his hometown of Racine, Wis., he sometimes scans it using an application he downloaded to his Google ( GOOG) Android smartphone. More often than not, it takes Hellesen to a brand’s website. “About 80 percent of the time, I’m disappointed that I scanned it,” Hellesen says. “Mostly it’s just curiosity at this point. I’m not actually expecting anything useful.”

QR codes are dense grids of black-and-white boxes, a more sophisticated cousin to the bar code that can hold 100 times more information. The tags can be put to many uses—inventory tracking, event ticketing—but no one has embraced them more visibly than advertisers. They pop up at stores, on posters, and in magazines to deliver coupons or direct shoppers to websites with more product details. QR codes convey “the appearance of being tech savvy,” says Thaddeus Kromelis, a strategist at WPP’s ( WPPGY) Blue State Digital, which has done work for Barack Obama’s presidential campaigns. Over the last couple of years they’ve become much more common; in December 2011 they appeared in 8.4 percent of all magazine ads, up from 3.6 percent at the start of the year, according to marketing firm Nellymoser.

That ad trend may be reversing as more consumers, like Hellesen, realize QR codes aren’t always worth the effort it takes to whip out a phone. According to Forrester Research ( FORR), only 5 percent of Americans scanned a QR code between May and July of last year, the latest data available. “Advertisers are looking at every way possible that they can connect with consumers,” says Patti Freeman Evans, the analyst who edited the report. “Consumers aren’t saying, ‘Oh, I really want to be able to connect with companies and brands.’”

As a result, advertisers’ “initial enthusiasm has tempered,” says Chia Chen, a senior vice president at the Publicis Group’s Boston-based Digitas. He estimates that 15 percent of his clients still use the codes. At WPP’s Possible Worldwide, less than a fifth of clients have shown any interest in the tags this year, says Anders Rosenquist, the agency’s director of emerging media. Both numbers are down, the firms say. Last year, Google halted a campaign in which it mailed QR-code stickers to retailers that would lead scanners to listings on the search company’s site for local businesses.

QR codes have always had limitations as advertising tools. They can only be used by smartphone owners, who have to download an app and hold their phone steady to capture a clear image. The process doesn’t work well with faraway billboards or in low lighting, and it requires cellular service. For some reason, advertisers have put them on posters found in subways and in United Continental’s Hemispheres In-Flight Magazine, places where travelers usually don’t have reception. Such examples have made QR codes the butt of jokes. A blog called WTF QR Code contains photos of poorly placed codes that no one could reasonably be expected to scan, such as on a billboard along the highway or inside a liquor bottle. Another blog called Pictures of People Scanning QR Codes has garnered hundreds of fans. The site contains no posts.

Engendering brand loyalty was never the intention of the small Tokyo-based team that invented the technology in 1994 at Denso Wave, a subsidiary of Toyota Group. The company created the square codes to improve inventory tracking for auto parts, says Koji Fujiyoshi, an executive there. Denso Wave patented its creation and published the specification online, allowing anyone to use QR codes for free. Some organizations have found creative uses for the technology. A wildlife refuge in Sanibel, Fla., has QR codes situated along its trails to give visitors more information about the animals they see, according to Toni Westland, a ranger there. Rock the Vote is putting codes on T-shirts the organization is giving away at concerts this summer. Scanning them leads to voter registration forms, says Heather Smith, the organization’s president.

To put it charitably, advertisers have been, well, less creative. “Very few people want to visit your corporate website to begin with,” says Kelli Robertson, a director at AKQA, a digital ad agency acquired by WPP on June 20. “Fewer want to do it when they’re out in the world or reading a magazine.”

Even without advertisers, the QR code might thrive. Online ticket site Fandango says about 13 percent of the movie theaters it works with have installed QR-code readers to scan tickets displayed on smartphones. That number is expected to reach 25 percent by the end of the year, says Jessica Yi, Fandango’s product chief. And smartphone ticketing will get a boost from Apple ( AAPL) this fall when the next version of its iPhone operating system is released. The new software includes a feature called Passbook, a digital wallet to store boarding passes, coupons, movie tickets, and gift cards—many of which rely on QR codes. Passbook “will raise awareness” for QR codes, Yi says. “That’s the great thing that Apple brings to the table.”

Meanwhile, Denso Wave is working on what it calls “the next generation of QR codes,” including versions that are smaller and can securely transmit encrypted data. One could even help crack down on counterfeit goods, Fujiyoshi says. And there will always be people who put the existing version of the QR code to unconventional uses. David Quiring, the Seattle owner of a headstone shop, sells a $75 service that lets families set up websites devoted to their dearly departed. Those can be accessed by scanning QR-code stickers on tombstones. He ends up having to explain what a QR code is to every customer, and less than 30 percent of them buy the sticker, he says. “I’ve been trying to continue the move forward by actually bringing monuments into the 21st century,” he says. “Nobody knows this technology is out there.”

The bottom line: QR codes are increasingly used for smartphone ticketing and other purposes, but they’ve been largely ineffective as advertising tools.

In the fall, Toronto resident Pearl Chen placed quarter-size stickers on the 30 or so spice containers in her kitchen. Now whenever she taps her Samsung smartphone against a bottle of turmeric, say, the device does a Google ( GOOG) search for recipes featuring the spice. “I can scan it and get ideas for what to cook,” says Chen, 31, the founder of Karma Laboratory, a technology startup focused on education. She sees the stickers as a way to squeeze a bit more utility from everyday objects, which usually “just stand there and don’t say very much.”

Chen is an early adopter in the world of programmable tags, pieces of paper or plastic that sell for a few bucks apiece and communicate with gadgets via a short-range radio technology known as near field communication, or NFC. They can be customized to trigger an action on any phone with an NFC chip: Tap the phone against a tag on a business card to automatically download contact information, for instance, or tap a tag on your nightstand to set the morning alarm. “It’s very convenient,” says John Devlin, an analyst at ABI Research.

NFC tags are gaining a following as the number of smartphones able to scan them skyrockets. This year the research firm IHS iSuppli ( IHS) expects manufacturers of smart devices will ship nearly 21 million NFC-enabled handsets in the U.S. and 186 million worldwide, up from 93 million last year. According to press reports, Apple ( AAPL) is considering adding an NFC chip to the new iPhone expected this fall, which would give the technology a significant boost.

The tags are available from independent websites, and ABI estimates that by the end of this year there will be about 10 million of them in the U.S. as major mobile companies begin marketing them as a must-have feature. Earlier this year, Sony ( SNE) began selling $20 SmartTags that can change the volume or launch news or weather apps on the company’s Xperia phone. In the past month, Samsung started selling TecTiles, a $15 package of five NFC tags, in T-Mobile ( DTE) and Sprint ( S) stores and will soon make them available on Amazon.com ( AMZN). Some of the tags come already programmed to do a specific task, while others require users to download an application to customize each tag with one of several dozen possible actions.

Tagstand sticker

Tagstand, which sells NFC tags and develops the software to program and manage them, was founded a year ago and now employs seven staffers. Its revenue tripled over a three-month period to $30,000 in May, the company says, and Tagstand expects to be profitable within six months. “We think the opportunity is massive,” says Chief Executive Officer Kulveer Taggar, a Brit who uses NFC tags to check into the location-based service Foursquare at his boxing gym. Tagstand has sold about 1 million NFC tags in the past year, and in June the company released a mobile app that simplifies the tag-programming process.

Some of NFC’s biggest advocates are event planners, who hand out specialized gear integrating NFC tags that can be scanned at stations set up around a venue. In May a third of the attendees at the Manhattan Cocktail Classic, held at the New York Public Library, used NFC-enabled bracelets that were linked to their e-mail addresses. As partygoers sampled the hundreds of cocktails available, they could tap their bracelet against NFC readers to have recipes sent to them.

On June 7 roughly 1,000 people at the Lobster Roll Rumble in New York City’s Metropolitan Pavilion used NFC bracelets to vote for their favorite crustacean dish. “Everyone thought it was the coolest thing,” says Kai Mathey, director of communications for event organizer Tasting Table, which paid Tagstand about $6,000 to set up the system.

Scanning NFC tags could become commonplace as they make their way into stores and books and onto movie posters. Says wireless-industry analyst Chetan Sharma: “Just like Google has become the starting point of interaction with information on the Web, NFC could become the starting point of interaction with the physical world.”

The bottom line: With nearly 21 million NFC phones shipping in the U.S. this year, early adopters are expected to deploy 10 million programmable tags.